Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Although I was appalled by the hair fetishist who slipped his questionnaire under the partition, at least his tastes were specific enough to be fulfillable, whereas mine were raging but shifting, leaving me no peace. I couldn’t find the answer because I couldn’t phrase the question. After I ejaculated I felt full of self-hatred every time, and every time I swore I’d never return to the toilets. Every time I had a free moment during the day when I could roost in the poultry house, I felt the excitement of anticipation creep over me. My hands went cold, a blotch of blush would float cloud-slow up my chest and neck, cover my face. If a girl stopped me to chat in the hall, I’d be torn by anxiety. What if he got away, the one big fish to cruise our pond today? I’d never said one word to all but one of the other campus homosexuals who were john queens. But I knew them all: the beetle-browed man whose outsize glasses touched his hairline above and his beard below and who, in his stall, would lower his ponderous haunches just far enough for my hand to touch his canine penis; the tall law student bearing a heavy tome of torts and investing his stall like a city under siege—no cough, no tapping foot, no lightest emery board of a sigh; the businessman in monogrammed shirt and glossy sharkskin I’d seen give a blow job that first day; and Jeremy, the only one I spoke to, a fat boy with a huge mouth and pomaded hair who waddled out of his booth with a diva’s disdain, gathering his reversible windbreaker around him as though it were a sable. None of us wanted each other but contempt had bred familiarity and we’d raise a weary eyebrow or stifle a yawn as we passed each other on our rounds as though to say, “Still at it?” or, “Slim pickings tonight.” The thrill came when one bagged not another old fruit but a hot young college kid, for although I myself was at least young and in college, I already saw myself as vampire-cold, turned prematurely old as a punishment for vice, and not nearly enviable enough to be that exciting thing, a “college kid.” I’d learned to feel nostalgia for my own youth while I was living it. I started dating Annie Schroeder, although I sometimes felt I was carting an aunt about. Her makeup was too elaborate and her clothes too stylish for the Beatniks I was meeting, among whom the women wore little other than black wool sweaters and skirts and black tights and paisley babushkas. For variety, they might tote a green bookbag or paint on badger eyes or let their bushy, waist-length hair bounce over their shoulders.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  In fact, the recourse to affective notions of sympathy, love, and delight point to a long history of affective politics among Black women. Consequently, these early Black feminist theories of race should inform the contemporary “turn to affect.” The invocation of affect in Black women’s theorizing and activism is fundamentally tied up, as Melissa Harris-Perry has argued, with a desire for social recognition as both fully human on the one hand and as fully capable citizens on the other. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Harris-Perry argues that “the public sphere makes a unique contribution to human self-actualization by offering opportunities for recognition.” 74 Though Williams misunderstands this desire for recognition in terms of a working-class desire for recognition from the upper class, she rightly realizes that there is a fundamental need for mutual recognition in the work of racial uplift. Her work appreciated the fact that, as Megan Watkins has argued, “the corporeal instantiation of recognition, the sensations one may feel in being recognized” ... accumulate “over time, fostering a sense of selfworth. Moments of recognition, therefore, function as affective force.” 75 This notion of corporeal instantiation—that is, embodied awareness—coupled with nineteenth-century Black women’s deep insistence on the notion of impressibility as a mechanism for the social regeneration of the race, suggest that affective ideas informed their notions of kinship, intellectual labor, and political activism. 76 Moreover, the NACW, as an organ of race public opinion and a social service organization that recognized both the intensity of Black suffering and the limitlessness of Black possibility, marshaled a certain level of “affective force” in order to do its intellectual and political work. That shared sense of care and sympathy for the suffering of Black women that animated the work of the NACW arcs back to the affective term used to frame this chapter: organized anxiety. Williams demonstrated the ways that the work of the NACW helped to inculcate a notion of racial unity through the cultivation of broad racial sympathy and the ways that the NACW helped to codify race public opinion. 77 Racial sociality and race public opinion are two critical components in the creation of a Black public sphere. So Williams’s work offers a fundamental insight about the operation of Black public life, namely that Black publics are forged—organized—on anxious terms. Anxiety is used in her work not only in the negative but also in the positive sense; that is, not only in terms of what Black people are anxious about but also what they are anxious for. It is simultaneously an anxiety of adversity and an anxiety of aspiration. There was a collective anxiety of aversion to the oppressive social conditions Black people endured and also a kind of aspirational anxiety to achieve something different. Williams uses anxiety in both senses in “The Club Woman” essay. She registers her aversion to the social repression of Black women in her proclamation about organized anxiety.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  The problem is that such theorizations overdetermine and oversimplify the complex ways that Black women both theorized and engaged the politics of Black female embodiment. Certainly, race women worked hard to keep their private lives out of public view, but the readiness with which they spoke about their feelings and about their experiences of bodily violation suggests that dissemblance as a theoretical framework can cause us to misrecognize the powerful ways that Black women did choose to make their bodies and their feelings visible to the public. Mary Church Terrell, the first president of the NACW and one of the key architects of the ideology of Black women’s respectability, spoke in her autobiography not only to intergenerational issues with depression but also of her own bodily commitment to pleasure through dance (see chapter two). Perhaps Black women’s expressions of feeling in public were part of a larger enigmatic dissemblance project, as Hine suggests. But if we view the public expressions of feeling and public invocations of embodied discourse as forms of dissimulation, then we also mire Black women’s theorizing and public work in a kind of mistrust that makes them always unknowable. But Williams and Matthews’s explicit investment in removing Black women from the veil of obscurity and in making Black women knowable entities suggests that to read them primarily according to the terms of dissemblance is to miss the powerful ways that they attempted to both frame and politicize their interior lives and feelings. Melissa Harris-Perry argues that Black women’s “emotions affect how we engage in politics” and that “to understand black women as political actors we must explore how intersecting disadvantages based on race, gender, class, and sexuality influence how these women feel and think.”28 Williams argued that Black women’s feelings, particularly their anxiety, influenced and shaped their political agenda.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  American Literature, or History in Literature? Or maybe she should go with Sociology or Social Anthropology or Visual and Environmental Studies, whatever that was. She was Charlie in the Chocolate Factory with too many choices, feeling she had to gobble up as much as she could as fast as she could, before someone wised up and kicked her out. At night in their rooms at Weld South ideas were batted around like badminton birdies. Vix listened and absorbed but rarely spoke as the others discussed the equality of the sexes, genes versus environment, and the biggie—The Meaning of Life. Never mind that the Countess had told her there was no meaning. She was in Robert Coles’s Gen Ed 105, The Literature of Social Reflection. He understood life. She wanted to. On the first Tuesday in October, Vix’s father called at dawn to tell her Lanie had given birth. Vix was an aunt to a baby girl named Amber. Maia rolled over in her bed. “What?” she asked, half-asleep, as Vix hung up the phone, dazed. “My sister had a baby. I’m an aunt.” “I didn’t know you had an older sister.” “I don’t. Lanie’s just turning seventeen.” Maia sat up. “You mean she’s like a ... teenaged mother? A statistic?” “Exactly. She’s a statistic.” No teenage sister of Maia’s would ever get pregnant and if she did, she’d have an abortion. Vix knew that Maia thought of New Mexico as a third-world country and Vix’s family as something right out of Tobacco Road. But to Vix, Maia represented the worst of privileged suburbia. She found her naive and judgmental. Vix’s father sent a picture, one of those newborn shots taken at the hospital. The baby was a preemie, just four pounds but otherwise okay. Tawny would have no part of Lanie’s life. She made her bed, now let her lie in it. Vix sent Lanie a copy of Dr. Spock, plus a snuggly for Amber. The next time the phone rang at an ungodly hour it was Caitlin. “Where are you?” Vix asked. “Rome. It’s fantastic. I’m studying Italian ... and art ... and history where it really happened.”

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started. I wish I had a secret I could let you in on, some formula my father passed on to me in a whisper just before he died, some code word that has enabled me to sit at my desk and land flights of creative inspiration like an air-traffic controller. But I don’t. All I know is that the process is pretty much the same for almost everyone I know. The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it. It is a little like when you have something difficult to discuss with someone, and as you go to do it, you hope and pray that the right words will come if only you show up and make a stab at it. And often the right words do come, and you—well—“write” for a while; you put a lot of thoughts down on paper. But the bad news is that if you’re at all like me, you’ll probably read over what you’ve written and spend the rest of the day obsessing, and praying that you do not die before you can completely rewrite or destroy what you have written, lest the eagerly waiting world learn how bad your first drafts are. The obsessing may keep you awake, or the self-loathing may cause you to fall into a narcoleptic coma before dinner. But let’s just say that you do fall asleep at a normal hour. Then the odds are that you will wake up at four in the morning, having dreamed that you have died. Death turns out to feel much more frantic than you had imagined. Typically you’ll try to comfort yourself by thinking about the day’s work—the day’s excrementitious work. You may experience a jittery form of existential dread, considering the absolute meaninglessness of life and the fact that no one has ever really loved you; you may find yourself consumed with a free-floating shame, and a hopelessness about your work, and the realization that you will have to throw out everything you’ve done so far and start from scratch. But you will not be able to do so. Because you suddenly understand that you are completely riddled with cancer. And then the miracle happens.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I let my mind wander. After a moment I may notice that I’m trying to decide whether or not I am too old for orthodontia and whether right now would be a good time to make a few calls, and then I start to think about learning to use makeup and how maybe I could find some boyfriend who is not a total and complete fixer-upper and then my life would be totally great and I’d be happy all the time, and then I think about all the people I should have called back before I sat down to work, and how I should probably at least check in with my agent and tell him this great idea I have and see if he thinks it’s a good idea, and see if he thinks I need orthodontia—if that is what he is actually thinking whenever we have lunch together. Then I think about someone I’m really annoyed with, or some financial problem that is driving me crazy, and decide that I must resolve this before I get down to today’s work. So I become a dog with a chew toy, worrying it for a while, wrestling it to the ground, flinging it over my shoulder, chasing it, licking it, chewing it, flinging it back over my shoulder. I stop just short of actually barking. But all of this only takes somewhere between one and two minutes, so I haven’t actually wasted that much time. Still, it leaves me winded. I go back to trying to breathe, slowly and calmly, and I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments. It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story in my hometown, in the late fifties, when the trains were still running. I am going to paint a picture of it, in words, on my word processor. Or all I am going to do is to describe the main character the very first time we meet her, when she first walks out the front door and onto the porch. I am not even going to describe the expression on her face when she first notices the blind dog sitting behind the wheel of her car—just what I can see through the one-inch picture frame, just one paragraph describing this woman, in the town where I grew up, the first time we encounter her. E. L.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  You’re a little better. Then you try to read something, but you end up reading your own manuscript and reeling with shame at how bad it is. But just when you start to go into actual spasm, your friend calls back and says he’s just read another chapter and really, on the souls of his grandchildren, he swears it’s the best thing you’ve ever written; he loves it and he loves you. So you are Okay again, for a good ten minutes or so. After another week, you call your agent because you can’t stand pretending to be cool anymore, but your agent hasn’t read your manuscript yet because he is swamped with infinitely more important matters. He tells you with the faintest hint of irritation that the very second he finishes it or hears from your editor, you will be called. And that everything is probably just fine. Okay? the agent asks. All better? You want to go rip his face off. Instead, you pray. And then you see in a flash of blinding insight that your agent and editor are in cahoots, and what you heard as irritation was really just the strain of withholding hysterics. After being on the phone all morning reading each other passages from your book, they agree that it is the most embarrassingly bad book ever written, and they are honking and screaming with laughter. At one point your editor is laughing so hard that she has to take some digitalis, and your agent ruptures a blood vessel in his throat. They are reading the scene to each other where your hero’s father dies. (And if you actually have a contract with these people, you assume that your editor has to get off the phone at this point so that he can go talk to the legal department to see if they have to pay you the last part of the advance they owe you, or if maybe they can even sue you to collect the money they have already paid you.) But all you can do is wait and wait and wait, until finally your agent or editor calls and says the book is terrific and it will be published in the spring or the fall or whenever. It will be published. And then there are some happy months, rewriting, editing, working with the copy editor, loved and reassured every step of the way, and then there is the utter miracle of galleys, where your book comes to you set in type and it looks like a real person was involved in writing it. Many nonwriters assume that publication is a thunderously joyous event in the writer’s life, and it is certainly the biggest and brightest carrot dangling before the eyes of my students. They believe that if they themselves were to get something published, their lives would change instantly, dramatically, and for the better.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Later, in celebrating the work of a group of Midwestern clubwomen who had started a kindergarten, she wrote that their success “is a happy justification of the wisdom and anxiety of the colored club woman to extend these schools wherever it is possible to do so.” 78 In this latter case, her use of the term anxiety referred to Black women’s aspirations to create better schools for Black children. Certainly, much of the anxiety at the heart of the club movement came from an investment in respectability politics, middle-class aspiration, and the demand that all true race women conform to such dictates. Indeed, racial respectability emerges again and again as a critical pillar of the NACW School of thought. However, racial respectability had both class-based and gender-based investments. Much of the anxiety that race women experienced issued from their concern over the stultifying and damaging definitions of Black women’s sexuality and gender identity. Thus, racial respectability acted not only as a tool of class and gender disciplining (see chapter three) but also as a tool of gender definition and theorization. This fact, together with the other pillars of the NACW school—the combatting of Black women’s civic unknowability and epistemic subjugation, the training of a Black female leadership class, the forging of a new racial sociality that respected the agency of all Black women regardless of class, the reshaping of public opinion through embodied discourse, and the systematic study and dispensation of practical forms of knowledge within local Black communities—militates against an uncritical dismissal of these women on the grounds of elitism. The organized anxiety of women placed Black women’s own racial struggles and aspirations at the center of Black public life. These women became not only builders of Black social and brick-and-mortar institutions, but also knowledge creators and shapers of public opinion. Their organized anxiety was rooted in the recognition that Black women’s lived realities are deeply tied to the set of ideas circulating about them in the social world. At the same time, however, Williams’s notion of racial sociality suggests the need for a less superficial form of racial recognition, one less concerned with shifting race public opinion and more concerned with allowing Black women to both see and be seen by each other as subjects worthy of social protections and possibilities. Fannie Barrier Williams and Mary Church Terrell combined intellectual and political resources (and class access) to shape the NACW into a formidable intellectual and political force driving Black politics in the early twentieth century. Mary Church Terrell managed to steer the critical terrain of her life beyond her initial involvement with NACW into a larger and more prominent leadership role that lasted through several decades. In the next chapter, I consider the creative ways that Terrell carried the influence of the NACW School of Thought into a whole new generation of Black politics.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  At the same time, much of the broad external support of Barack Obama, coupled with internally (and secretively) voiced dissent, can be understood through Williams’s dual anxiety framework, which catalogues an anxiety of aspiration and an anxiety of aversion. We are anxious for leaders that represent the interests of Black communities and are averse to the continuation of social conditions that disfranchise our communities. Barack Obama’s presence encompasses both these anxieties, perhaps causing folks to offer both bombastic levels of criticism and bombastic levels of support. In this regard, Williams’s call for a new racial sociality, rooted not in class relations or in easy deferrals to race unity, but in a deliberate and radical empathy for other Black people, is an idea whose time has come. Surely, her understandings of the affective relationships between black people can inform our perennial conversations about terms like the Black community and Black unity. Toni Cade Bambara, whom I examine in chapter four, issues the call for new forms of racial sociality again through what she terms a commitment to “Blackhood.” And, indeed, Alicia Garza’s herstory of the Black Lives Matter Movement suggests that this new

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  commonplaces, rather than ideas,” bookended Pierce’s spectrum. 22 She also used the work of famed scholar Richard Hofstadter to distinguish between intelligence and intellect: “Intellect is the critical, creative and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, reorder, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings in situations as a whole.” 23 One woman, Mary Turner, quoted in the article suggested: “[T]he intellectual brings another capacity besides memory and learning to the field of knowledge. She must create entirely new elements.” 24 And finally, Pierce returned to Gwendolyn Brooks, who said, “[A]n intellectual is one who observes and/or claws out facts and ideas, worries them, turns them inside out, assembles them, relates them, and—on the highest level—enhances or nourishes them.” 25 Ranging from pure, to public, to pragmatic, to pseudo, Pierce imagined a far more dynamic world of possibilities for Black women intellectuals than other Black thinkers had managed to do. Certainly, Black women have worried ideas, turned them inside out, and enhanced and nourished the constellation of terms that shape how we think about contemporary Black life. But even if Negro women intellectuals could be found, and this, it appears, was debatable, they faced age-old problems, the primary one being (apparently): Who would marry them? Just as Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Pauli Murray had done at some point in their careers, Pierce had to grapple with the effect of Black marriage politics on Black women’s intellectual work. In a section of the article, reminiscent of Murray’s “Why Negro Girls Stay Single,” interviewee Mary Turner lamented the tendency of Black women intellectuals to marry “beneath their intellectual levels.” At the same time, however, she argued that “intellectualism should not be an excuse for ignoring care of the family.” In her estimation, husbands and wives should negotiate these challenges such that “in the case of any working woman, the husband should be willing to pitch in where needed, without regarding each effort as a threat to his masculinity.” 26 If all efforts at finding a suitable mate failed, Black women, Pierce argued, could pursue a range of other outlets: “She may turn to another race, often giving more than she receives. She may wind up with a ‘shadow’ husband who, while not her equal, at least doesn’t impede her progress. ... Failing in any of the above, the Negro woman generally decides to bypass marriage completely (by becoming Lesbian or celibate) or to take a lover.” 27 Despite Pierce’s assumption that heterosexual, companionate marriage was the desired end for all professional, intellectual women, she does at least gesture toward the possibility of other intimate arrangements.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Like the works of late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Black women intellectuals, Beyond Respectability proffers its own kind of list of Black women public intellectuals. But it is just one list out of many that have yet to be constructed. I chose these women not only because of their overlooked or understudied intellectual contributions, but because they are linked together through their work. Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, and other nineteenth-century Black women who make cameos in this book were colleagues, who in many cases knew each other. Mary Church Terrell is offered here as an ideological bridge between the early race women and later ones like Pauli Murray and Toni Cade Bambara. Terrell and Murray met while doing desegregation campaigning in Washington, D.C., in the 1940s, and Terrell was always among Murray’s own lists of influential Black leaders. Murray herself was connected with the advent of the Black feminist movement of the 1970s and was a key legal and social theorist, alongside colleagues like Toni Cade Bambara. There are many maps and linkages that could be drawn when telling the stories of Black women intellectuals. This is one intellectual map, offering one set of geographic and genealogical routes that can be taken to more clearly understand the long and rich history of African American women’s knowledge production. My hope is that this map, this genealogy, leads us all, as Hopkins foresaw, in luminous and unexpected directions. CHAPTER 1 Organized AnxietyThe National Association of Colored Women and the Creation of the Black Public Sphere The club movement … is nothing less than the organized anxiety of women who have become intelligent enough to recognize their own low social condition and strong enough to initiate the forces of reform. —Fannie Barrier Williams (1900) In 1899, the NACW held a storied second biennial meeting in Chicago, one that cemented the presence of the Association as a formidable racial advocacy organization.1 By custom, racial organizations often held multiple organizational meetings in one city to cut down on travel costs. That year, the meeting occurred around the same time as the meeting of the National Afro-American Council, one of the forerunners of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After the conventions, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a short newspaper article comparing the “Two Negro Conventions.” Du Bois heaped praise upon the female convention-goers for their physical beauty, noting the “varying hues of female costumes contrasting with the infinite variety in color and tint of skin [and] the predominance of the soft Southern accent.” He was especially appreciative of papers given at the women’s meeting on “equal moral standards for men and women,” “the convict lease system,” and “practical club work.” Of particular importance in all papers was the primary theme of “the necessity of work among children.”2

• From Vox (1992)

  148 that are not clear, except that of course a woman mas turbating is so important an event in the physical uni verse that elemental relations in matter are affected as it occurs, and there are these sort of currents in the fluid that slowly move in a certain direction, like lines of force, which give you some sense of where the masturbation signals are coming from, although it takes years of prac tice, and of course a great deal of native skill as well, to learn how to read the fluid correctly. It's called the Bionic Mmmm-Detector, as you might suspect. Well, I'm driv ing down the expressway of an eastern city one evening around ten o'clock, in town on business, in my rented midsize car, my Ford Topaz, with the radio going, a classics oldie station, playing 'Ain't Nobody,' and I'm just driving along, and as usual I have my Mmmm- Detector open on the seat beside me, but the fluid is dark, and then I start curving through this residential area, very close to the buildings on either side, and I glance down at the seat beside me, and my God, I'm getting a very strong signal, I'm getting wave patterns I've never seen before, from very near and to my right, and craning my neck I catch sight of a lighted window, and I know that behind it you are in process, you are begin ning. My years of practice in reading the flux patterns in the watch tells me this is something very special, some thing I cannot pass by, and so I palm the steering wheel around suddenly and veer onto the off ramp and scoot back through the narrow streets, swearing at all the one way signs, and when I come to the door where the

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Working within a heteronormative framework, Murray advocated for healthier relationships between men and women: “We desire that the Negro male accept the Negro female as his equal and treat her accordingly and that he cease his ruthless aggression upon her and his emotional exploitation of her made possible by her admittedly inferior position as a social human being in the United States.” Murray also called for the Black man to “strive for emotional maturity himself,” to “see the Negro woman as a personality,” and to “maintain the dignity and respect for human personality with relation to the Negro woman.” Although her progressive prescriptions are laudable, they also reinscribe social norms that place queer identity and racial respectability at odds. In many ways, Murray’s capitulation to respectability politics speaks less to a personal failing and more to the recalcitrance and relentlessness of gender norms in Black communities, especially for those who wanted to assume the mantle of race leadership. In a 1943 letter to Lillian Smith, Murray attested to the unyielding heteronormativity she encountered among members of her own race, indicating that much of the social conservatism around sexuality that she experienced among Black people made her absolutely miserable. 58 Evelyn Hammonds argues that “Black lesbians are ‘outsiders’ in Black communities,” and that this outsider status is conferred by straight Black women acting in service of a politics of respectability or silence. “If we accept the existence of the ‘politics of silence’ as an historical legacy shared by all Black women,” Hammonds avers, “then certain expressions of Black female sexuality will be rendered dangerous, for individuals and for the collectivity. From this it follows that the culture of dissemblance makes it acceptable for some heterosexual Black women to cast lesbians as proverbial traitors to the race.” 59 Straight Black women particularly vexed Murray, despite her fervent defense of them in her manifesto. Murray was repeatedly rebuffed by putatively heterosexual Black women who, when they became attracted to her, told her to obtain psychiatric help and treated her as a deviant. Because of these conflicts, Murray did not always move unencumbered through the Black female social networks that characterized earlier generations of Black female leadership. For while the larger society viewed Black people as racial deviants, her own community viewed her as a sexual deviant. Murray’s failure to gain broad acceptance in African American communities informed her tendency to pursue friendships, leadership, and political consciousness outside of distinctively African American organizations and networks, though she did not eschew them altogether. 60 Consequently, Murray’s inability to embody—to reconcile—the discourses available to her regarding her biological sex, her gender identity, and her sexuality alongside respectable notions of Blackness, placed her in the uneasy position of defending racial respectability politics.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Anna Julia Cooper sounded a similar note when she argued that because Black people were in a rapid state of advancement as a race, “a race in such a stage of growth is peculiarly sensitive to impressions.” These “high strung people,” needed a strong presence from Black women who “must stamp weal or woe on the coming history of this people.”41 As mobilized by white women, the discourse of impressibility served to suggest that their race was civilized and therefore responded well to impressions. Among black women, the discourse of impressibility was invoked to contend that their race was impressible and therefore capable of civilization.42 Such ideas about the relationship between discourse and the body emerged from Lockean ideas about the body as a tabula rasa, upon which ideas and experiences could be inscribed. Williams’s language of organized anxiety, coupled with Cooper’s characterization of Black people as a “high strung people” “sensitive to impressions,” makes clear that Black women perceived an integral relationship between discourse and embodiment. Matthews argued that Black women’s intellectual work—their writing—could transmit impressions. Her assertion that Black women’s intellectual work was akin to transmitting an impression directly to the body is an example of the ways Black women used embodied discourse to suture the material to the discursive, linking the fleshy precarity of Black life to the forward-looking possibilities of progressive social discourse. They aimed to use their knowledge production to reshape the Black body (the language and thinking behind impressibility) in social discourse and to create new ideological and social terrain in which Black bodies (and the Black people inhabiting them) could safely exist. From the Exceptional to the Peculiar: Black Women as Citizen-WomenShifting white American public opinion regarding the plight of Black women required fervent advocacy from race women, not only in race literature, but also in public exchanges. During her World’s Fair speech, Williams took great care to explicate for her mostly white female audience “the bitterness of our experience as citizen-women.”43 A figurative compound expression known as a kenning, the term citizen-women refracted Black women’s experience of womanhood through the lens of citizenship. Black women’s experience as women relied upon their civic construction in the public sphere. By placing the word citizen first in the kenning, Williams gave priority to Black women’s status in the American body politic, attempting yet again to make Black women legible as civically knowable persons. Simultaneously, the term pointed to the ways that gender acted upon public identity categories, like that of “citizen,” where it was often invoked to signal both exclusion and the limits of democracy, rather than more noble realities. Black women’s civic experience of womanhood had been “bitter,” after all. Thus their civic experiences exposed deep fissures in the narrative of American exceptionalism, a narrative that the ceremony and fanfare of the exhibition attempted to quell.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  The renewing of conversations about Black leadership means the time is especially ripe for correcting the historical politics of exclusion that has kept these and other Black women public intellectuals relegated to the margins of Black leadership. In chapter one, I discuss at length Fannie Barrier Williams’s contention that the Club Movement was the “organized anxiety of women.” The term organized anxiety is especially generative for contemporary conversations about leadership. A focus on the ways in which anxiety can animate our organizing or, when misdirected, lead Black communities into disarray, offers a far more productive model for thinking about where leaders should direct their attention than accusing people of betrayal. At the same time, much of the broad external support of Barack Obama, coupled with internally (and secretively) voiced dissent, can be understood through Williams’s dual anxiety framework, which catalogues an anxiety of aspiration and an anxiety of aversion. We are anxious for leaders that represent the interests of Black communities and are averse to the continuation of social conditions that disfranchise our communities. Barack Obama’s presence encompasses both these anxieties, perhaps causing folks to offer both bombastic levels of criticism and bombastic levels of support. In this regard, Williams’s call for a new racial sociality, rooted not in class relations or in easy deferrals to race unity, but in a deliberate and radical empathy for other Black people, is an idea whose time has come. Surely, her understandings of the affective relationships between black people can inform our perennial conversations about terms like the Black community and Black unity. Toni Cade Bambara, whom I examine in chapter four, issues the call for new forms of racial sociality again through what she terms a commitment to “Blackhood.” And, indeed, Alicia Garza’s herstory of the Black Lives Matter Movement suggests that this new generation of Black leaders, including the many queer, trans, and gender nonconforming leaders among them, are working out in praxis Bambara’s notions of revolutionary Blackhood, unencumbered by the traditional dictates of respectable gender ideology.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I took a creative writing course from a published novelist, who told me during a private conference, “You should arrange the nouns in each paragraph like the heads in a painting by Uccello.” “Utrillo?” I said brightly. He turned away in disgust. But now I read a collection of short stories by new writers, and I saw they did something I can only call “braiding,” the interlacing of phrases, details, snatches of dialogue. Until now I’d written mindless confession in a desperate effort to keep my head above the rising waters of despair and confusion, which could also be called the flood of circumstantiality. Nothing had ever seemed more important to me than who said what first, what she said back, and where it happened, but now I was toying with the idea, gleaned from my recent reading, that a design of sorts, not a stencil but a weave, could be teased out of all these balls of yarn. I’d drag men back to my room, one after another, guiding them up the fire escape into my window; they didn’t want to be seen by the other boarders any more than I wanted them seen. Afterward they’d smile awkwardly, dress, stand on tiptoe to comb their hair in my pointlessly high desk mirror, say, “Well, see you ’round,” and duck out the window and back down the rusting metal steps that boomed faintly with each step. Once the man was gone, I’d return to my story. I’d switch on my record of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut or Bartók’s violin concerto and pour myself a shot of Drambuie, a liqueur I didn’t realize was meant to be a sort of liquid dessert, not a steady drink. In a moment I’d weigh anchor, the white room would drift into a fast current, and I’d be alone with my characters. No mother to say, “Lights out,” no dormitory master patrolling the corridors, no fraternity brothers interrupting me, just four walls of my own, rent paid, and five months to go until summer vacation would spoil my sport. My lights burned their way into the dawn. At first I’d feel lonely, afraid, itchy, very afraid to go on with my story, afraid it wasn’t any good, afraid it was terrific and I was about to spoil it, afraid it was better than I understood and I would never know how to equal it again, afraid it was cold, repellent, inhuman, and my friends would see through me and realize I wasn’t such a nice guy after all. I’d jump up, pace the room, get halfway down the fire escape in search of the third sexual partner of the night—and then this partial retreat would calm me sufficiently so that I could pick up the signal my page was faintly beeping. What if I were to give my character, Sally, a version of Annie’s poor beehive?

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  13 But I, like a deaf man, do not hear; I am like a mute man who does not open his mouth. 14 Yes, I am like a man who does not hear, In whose mouth are no arguments. 15 For in You, O LORD , I hope; You will answer, O Lord my God. 16 For I pray, “May they not rejoice over me, Who, when my foot slips, would boast against me.” 17 For I am ready to fall; My sorrow is continually before me. 18 For I do confess my guilt and iniquity; I am filled with anxiety because of my sin. [2 Cor 7:9 , 10 ] 19 But my [numerous] enemies are vigorous and strong, And those who hate me without cause are many. 20 They repay evil for good, they attack and try to kill me, Because I follow what is good. 21 Do not abandon me, O LORD ; O my God, do not be far from me. 22 Make haste to help me, O Lord, my Salvation. Psalm 39 The Vanity of Life. To the Chief Musician; for Jeduthun. A Psalm of David. 1 I SAID, “I will guard my ways That I may not sin with my tongue; I will muzzle my mouth While the wicked are in my presence.” 2 I was mute and silent [before my enemies], I refrained even from good, And my a distress grew worse. 3 My heart was hot within me. While I was musing the fire burned; Then I spoke with my tongue: 4 “LORD , let me know my [life’s] end And [to appreciate] the extent of my days; Let me know how frail I am [how transient is my stay here]. 5 “Behold, You have made my days as [short as] hand widths, And my lifetime is as nothing in Your sight. Surely every man at his best is a mere breath [a wisp of smoke, a vapor that vanishes]! [Eccl 1:2 ] Selah. 6 “Surely every man walks around like a shadow [in a charade]; Surely they make an uproar for nothing; Each one builds up riches, not knowing who will receive them. [Eccl 2:18 , 19 ; 1 Cor 7:31 ; James 4:14 ] 7 “And now, Lord, for what do I expectantly wait? My hope [my confident expectation] is in You. 8 “Save me from all my transgressions; Do not make me the scorn and reproach of the [self-righteous, arrogant] fool. 9 “I am mute, I do not open my mouth, Because it is You who has done it. 10 “Remove Your plague from me; I am wasting away because of the conflict and opposition of Your hand. 11 “With rebukes You discipline man for sin; You consume like a moth what is precious to him; Surely every man is a mere breath [a wisp of smoke, a vapor that vanishes]. Selah.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  No one respected them for their labor in a country where the idea of honorable poverty had vanished. And yet we had done something, we’d loaded transcontinental trucks. More than most fuckin’ men did in a night. But mostly I just ached. The pain of work, real labor, had driven splinters into my muscles, into the crouching muscles, the climbing muscles, the bending-over muscles, the lifting muscles, the just-standing-there muscles. My upper body had rusted shut in its basin of pelvic bones and couldn’t turn anymore. I was a tired animal, and I tied a feedbag of milk and cereal over my nose. I couldn’t tell if I was big or small. In some ways I felt big, because the men said I was strong and could get stronger, but the boy in me was skinny and losing weight fast in that sweatbox. I couldn’t figure out my size, because in my mind I kept modeling a wax effigy of myself, now puny, now a big bear of a worker, now a supple girl without breasts or vagina although responsively female: treat me as a woman and you can rule me. The wax was soft and getting softer, nearly fluid, and as it melted its color became milkier. It would flow out of the chubby cool forms of a child, his sturdy legs, big head, lips lucent as fruit jellies, into lanky adolescence. A moment later it had set into a thick neck, barrel chest, thickening biceps, and even my penis, a moment ago nothing but a tiny urine spout, would thicken and grow, the river god’s sex in a bed of ropey moss. On my day off I went to the Oak Street beach. Luxury apartment buildings lined the lakefront and the six-lane Outer Drive. On one side of the drive strolled businessmen in coats and ties and women in dresses and big summer hats. On the other was a wide, white-sand beach and bathers in swimsuits surveyed by lifeguards. Between these two worlds, one formal, the other nearly nude, the traffic streamed ceaselessly. I felt my grip on this, the “nice” part of town, was slipping. I had no confidence I’d ever land a decent job after school. Would I be condemned to loading trucks? My shoulders thickened brutishly. On the beach I saw a group of older gay guys, and I spread my towel beside them. They quieted down as I stripped to my swimsuit, and one of them even put on his glasses. I couldn’t tell what the verdict was. But Midwesterners are friendly people who chat and joke easily with strangers, and soon enough I was talking with one of my neighbors, a rosy-cheeked countertenor with a haze of silky hair unexpectedly covering his back and shoulders. His nose and the bald top of his head were painfully red. He put on a shirt and baseball cap.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  36 “But of that [exact] day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son [in His humanity], but the Father alone. 37 “For the coming of the Son of Man (the Messiah) will be just like the days of Noah. 38 “For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the [very] day when Noah entered the ark, 39 and they did not know or understand until the flood came and swept them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be [unexpected judgment]. [Gen 6:5–8 ; 7:6–24 ] 40 “At that time two men will be in the field; one will be h taken [for judgment] and one will be left. 41 “Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken [for judgment] and one will be left. Be Ready for His Coming 42 “So be alert [give strict attention, be cautious and active in faith], for you do not know which day [whether near or far] your Lord is coming. 43 “But understand this: If the head of the house had known what time of the night the thief was coming, he would have been on the alert and would not have allowed his house to be broken into. [Luke 12:39 , 40 ] 44 “Therefore, you [who follow Me] must also be ready; because the Son of Man is coming at an hour when you do not expect Him. 45 “Who then is the faithful and wise servant whom his master has put in charge of his household to give the others [in the house] their food and supplies at the proper time? [Luke 12:42–46 ] 46 “Blessed is that [faithful] servant when his master returns and finds him doing so. 47 “I assure you and most solemnly say to you that he will put him in charge of all his possessions. 48 “But if that servant is evil and says in his heart, ‘My master is taking his time [he will not return for a long while],’ 49 and begins to beat his fellow servants and to eat and drink with drunkards; 50 the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour of which he is not aware, 51 and will cut him in two and put him with the hypocrites; in that place there will be weeping [over sorrow and pain] and grinding of teeth [over distress and anger]. Matthew 25 Parable of Ten Virgins 1 “T hen the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins, who took their lamps and went to a meet the bridegroom. 2 “Five of them were foolish [thoughtless, silly, and careless], and five were wise [far-sighted, practical, and sensible].

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  This kind of cultural discombobulation over the role of intellectuals in racial leadership dramatizes a continuing crisis of racial manhood, and of the construction of Black gender identities more generally, that underwrites most of the major shifts in Black leadership throughout the twentieth century. However, I am less interested in what such dramas mean for Black men and more interested in the ways that Black women responded to these accusations. In this chapter, I consider how political movements, specifically Civil Rights and Black Power, and Black women’s responses to them have shaped the intellectual geography of Black thought and influenced the intellectual genealogies that are bequeathed to us. Through close readings of a range of cultural texts—the Ebony article, the civil rights autobiographies of Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara’s edited volume Black Woman—I map the broad cultural debates about Black women’s role in race leadership. Unlike more recent works in Civil Rights and Black Power Studies that are concerned with recovering Black women’s contributions to the struggle, I examine the ways that debates over the conceptual category of the intellectual illumine the gender politics of the shift from Civil Rights to Black Power. These cultural anxieties over the meaning of the intellectual also dovetail cultural anxiety about the ways Black men and women performed gender identity. Thus, such debates restage earlier twentieth-century debates within Black communities and Black organizations about the meanings of race womanhood and race manhood. Because these debates were not merely tactical, Black women not only responded politically but also intellectually, by conceptually reframing the terms of race womanhood. Toni Cade Bambara’s preface and essay, “On the Issue of Roles,” in her 1970 book, Black Woman, played a lead role in Black women’s attempts to articulate a coherent narrative about Black female identity and Black women’s leadership against the angst-ridden backdrop of Cruse’s proclamation of crisis. My examination reveals the ways in which battles over race leadership are always deeply tied to contestations over gender and demonstrates that these moments of cultural upheaval frequently urge a refiguring of existing categories of gender within Black communities. This chapter concludes the intellectual genealogy and geography of Black women’s public intellectual work that I have been mapping throughout Beyond Respectability. I argue that the kinds of Black feminist intellectual projects that emerge during the 1970s are, by and large, products of Black women’s public work rather than, for instance, traditional academic theorizing. By the 1980s, with the ascent of women like Mary Helen Washington, bell hooks, Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Patricia Hill Collins, Black feminism moved solidly into the academy, benefiting from a newly available and unprecedented set of institutional resources for Black women to professionalize public intellectual work. But the work of literary and creative intellectuals in the 1970s retained what Farah Jasmine Griffin has called an “extra-academic” tenor that allowed for a range of conversations and contestations about the nature of Black womanhood in the public sphere.